Nothing to report. Yet.
Reports are what we write; records are what agencies hand over. Neither has arrived. This is the placeholder standing in the window until the first one does.
Plate I — “Snoop unto them as they snoop unto us.” Two centuries, one habit.
The requests are out. Nothing has come back. That is the entire state of things, and saying it plainly seems better than filling the space with something that only looks like work.
What will land here
A Report is original writing, and it carries a byline. It is the thing we say about a document, which is a different act from publishing the document itself, and this site keeps the two visibly apart on purpose. Expect three kinds:
- When a record comes back. What the contract actually says, what the retention window actually is, what the invoice actually cost, and where that differs from what the agency said in public.
- When a body votes. A city council or a county board taking up a surveillance contract, before the vote rather than after it, while there is still something a resident can do about it.
- When something quietly changes. A vendor’s transparency portal that used to publish audit logs and now does not. Those changes are rarely announced. They are the reason for watching continuously instead of checking once.
What will not
Speculation dressed as reporting. If we cannot point at a document, a meeting, or a dated page, it does not get written. The whole standing of a records project rests on not confusing what it obtained with what it suspects, and that line is cheap to hold now and impossible to recover later.
In the meantime, the Watchlist shows what is being asked for and who it is being asked of, and Related Work points at people who have been doing this longer than we have and are worth your time on their own.
Subscribe by RSS if you want the first one when it lands. No account, no email address, nothing that tells us who you are.